Site Mobile Navigation

Mr. Softee Sets Sights on China and Beyond

Mr. Softee, the quintessential New York treat, is now being sold on the streets of Suzhou, China, under a new name: Mr. Soft Heart.Credit
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times

For more than half a century, Mr. Softee has been as synonymous with New York summers as open fire hydrants, its blue and white trucks and instantly recognizable jingle enticing children in Washington Heights, Coney Island and neighborhoods in between.

New York being a tough town, Mr. Softee has also endured its share of bumps and bruises. It has fought about noise with the city, which no longer allows the company’s trucks to play its jingle while parked.

The company hired private detectives to spy on Mr. Softee impersonators, and Mr. Softee drivers have gotten into verbal and even hand-to-hand battle with rival ice cream vendors.

Along the way, this quintessential New York institution has pursued an unlikely road to globalization.

Mr. Softee first tested the international waters not long after it got its start here, traveling, in 1961, to England. But, technically, Mr. Softee England was never part of the domestic empire of Mr. Softee, since the franchising rights were bought by a British company. Losing its American owners was apparently not good for Mr. Softee — after a bit of a heyday in the ’60s, Mr. Softee has all but vanished from England.

But more recently, Mr. Softee has pointed its cone-headed logo in a different direction, far from the brownstones of Brooklyn or the flats of London.

It happened almost by accident. An American working as an English teacher was walking around the streets of the city where he taught and noticed a deluge of American fast food franchises, but found nothing resembling the kind of soft-serve ice cream that his college roommate’s family had turned into a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

Now this staple of New York City life is being served 7,000 miles away, on the streets of Suzhou, an ancient city of more than six million people about 50 miles west of Shanghai. Mr. Softee or Mr. Soft Heart, the English translation of “ruan xin xian sheng” — there is no Mandarin word for Softee — has been a hit, with sales doubling every year since the first truck started rolling three years ago.

Photo

One of the five Mr. Softee trucks that operate in Suzhou, China, where, in contrast to New York, they can play the company's jingle while they are parked, as this one is outside a school.Credit
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times

There are now five Mr. Soft Heart trucks in Suzhou, and one in a nearby city, Taicang.

“There is a franchising boom going on in China that is similar to what was happening in America in the 1950s and 1960s, so we really jumped in at the right time,” said Alex Conway, the president of Mr. Softee China, whose grandfather James Conway helped found the company in 1956.

Customers like Meng Xiangbo, 19, a college student, have proved Mr. Conway right. He is a regular customer of the Mr. Softee truck that peddles its treats in Suzhou’s university district.

One recent balmy afternoon, Mr. Meng ordered a kiwi sundae. “They have six flavors,” he said of the sundaes. “I eat a different one every day. On Sunday, I rest.”

It was Mr. Conway’s college roommate, Turner Sparks, who first broached the idea that China might be ready for Mr. Softee.

“The only soft ice cream available was in places like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Mr. Sparks said. “I called Alex, who majored in business, and we started kicking around the idea. Before you knew it, we were talking to government officials and putting this thing together.”

Putting it together, however, was not easy.

Because Mr. Softee, which is based in Runnemede, N.J., is a foreign company, there were “a lot of forms to fill out, a lot of red tape,” Mr. Sparks said. A hygiene license had to be obtained, and company officials met repeatedly with Suzhou’s traffic police to explain a concept they had little knowledge of: selling products out of a truck. Mr. Soft Heart trucks were assigned specific routes and parking spots, with no deviating allowed.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In a reversal of New York’s noise restrictions, the trucks were allowed to play the Mr. Softee jingle only when parked.

And the menu offerings had to be tweaked for Chinese taste buds. Before the first Mr. Soft Heart truck was deployed, company officials conducted months of test tastes, giving ice cream away in a busy Suzhou square to learn what worked and what did not.

The trucks sell ice cream cones, sundaes, floats and milk shakes, just as they do in New York, but they also sell a variety of milk teas and flavors unlikely to be found anytime soon in American Mr. Softee trucks. The Chinese menu, for example, features something called a “red bean blast,” rice-cake-flavored ice cream covered with red beans and topped with whipped cream.

Photo

Credit
Jackson Lowen for The New York Times

“It’s one of our biggest sellers,” said Mr. Conway, who lives in Honolulu. “The local Chinese do not like their ice cream as sweet and heavy as people in America.”

Most of the products are bought or made in China — the cones, the ice cream mix, the trucks — except for one key ingredient: the milk, which is imported from the United States. “Milk from the United States keeps our ice cream tasting as close and consistent as possible with our American product,” Mr. Sparks said.

Not everything has worked out, however. There were, for example, the candy-coated sunflower seeds. They were meant to be an ice cream topping, but the coating discolored the vanilla ice cream, leading customers to believe something was wrong with it. The seeds were jettisoned.

Training Mr. Softee drivers has also been a challenge. One driver, Ji Xudong, who sold air-conditioners before becoming a Mr. Softee driver about a year ago, had to learn to temper his aggressive driving style, a byproduct of China’s congested roads.

“When I turn I have to slow down, or I make a mess of all the things in the back,” he said.

And despite Mr. Softee’s agreement with the traffic police, Mr. Ji said suspicious officers still stopped him. “They want to know what on earth we are doing,” he said.

Mr. Conway, whose recent wedding in Spring Lake, N.J., featured ice cream served out of a Mr. Softee truck outside the reception hall, said that Suzhou would soon have another Mr. Soft Heart truck, and that he was considering expansion to two other cities, Hangzhou and Wuxi.

His dreams about Asia extend beyond China. He is thinking about expanding the company into other countries, including Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

“The hardest thing about establishing ourselves in China was setting up our supply chain,” Mr. Conway said. “But now that it has been established and we have a solid base of operations outside of the United States, anything is possible.”

“In the end,” he added, “kids are the same all over the world. They see an ice cream truck, they come running.”

William Savadove contributed reporting from Suzhou, China.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2010, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Softee Sets Sights On Asia. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe